Chris Freiman
Professor, John Chambers College of Business and Economics, West Virginia University | Author of *Why It’s OK to Ignore Politics* | Libertarianism, neoliberalism, effective altruism
- If you dismiss the economic consensus on the harms of rent control, price gouging restrictions, etc. but embrace it on the harms of tariffs, you’re likely in the grip of politically motivated reasoning
- The key to understanding politics is recognizing that most partisans are more committed to opposing outparty members than adhering to their own policies and principles
- It’s easy to dismiss the significance of material abundance when we have it—it’s hard to dismiss its significance when we lose it
- A reminder on the anniversary of Stalin’s death
- This strikes me as an obvious point, but maybe it isn’t: an unconditional anti-war stance can in fact incentivize war by disregarding deterrence effects
- Mail delivery isn’t a public good and there’s no compelling reason not to privatize it
- There’s a tension between the progressive view on school choice (if you want the school of your choice, pay for it yourself) and the progressive view on SNAP benefits (recipients should be able to use them to get whatever they want)
- A lot of moral confusion arises from thinking of employers as something other than buyers of labor. Just as it’s morally permissible for you to seek out the best deal when shopping for a TV, it’s morally permissible for an employer to seek out the best deal when hiring workers
- People who claim that free speech primarily benefits the powerful have an exceedingly impoverished understanding of the history of free speech
- I’m seeing tax cuts characterized as “giving money” to those people whose taxes are cut but this wrongly assumes that the state has a stronger claim to that money than those people themselves
- When Republicans want to dramatically cut government spending without addressing entitlement programs
- The claim that no entrepreneur should earn one billion dollars is just as unpersuasive and arbitrary as claiming that no politician should earn ten million votes
- People typically don’t support tariffs because they’re efficient—they support tariffs because (1) doing so expresses and affirms their social identity (“put America first”) or (2) they receive the concentrated benefits while others pay the dispersed costs
- Reposted by Chris FreimanIn case you missed it - the latest PolPhilPod Is it ethical to not vote? Is it rational to? & does an existential threat change things? I debate with @chrisfreiman.bsky.social www.politicalphilosophypodcast.com/ip
- From *Why It’s OK to Ignore Politics*
- Reposted by Chris FreimanNew Political Philosophy Podcast Episode!! @chrisfreiman.bsky.social argues we need less voters, I argue we need more www.politicalphilosophypodcast.com/ip
- Reposted by Chris FreimanJust recorded a super interesting convo on if you should vote with @chrisfreiman.bsky.social
- If we accept Sowell’s view that conservatives endorse a “constrained vision” that should motivate a cautious approach to social and political change, it’s pretty clear that MAGA is not conservative
- If you think you’ll enrich Americans by imposing a tax on goods entering the country, you should try enriching your family by imposing a tax on goods entering your household
- This is a lukewarm—if not downright cold—take, but the basic mistake made by many socialists is regarding employment decisions as different, in some deep sense, than any other economic transaction that’s entered into voluntarily with the expectation of (mutual) benefit
- Milei update
- Check out my new post on EconLog: “Why Not Privatize the Post Office?” www.econlib.org/why-not-priv...
- Reposted by Chris FreimanIn 1820, 8 in 10 people worldwide lived on less than $1.90* a day, an extremely low poverty line. 200 years later, it had dropped to 1 in 10 people. How do we know how many people were in poverty 200 years ago? Where do these numbers come from?
- Unfortunately, many of those calling for the Democrats to move left just want the party to adopt some of worst parts of Trump’s economic nationalism
- Henry George: “Protective tariffs are a means whereby nations attempt to prevent their own people from trading. What protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.”
- Unrestricted birthright citizenship is unequivocally one of the greatest things about the US
- Milei update
- One of the worst forms of grandstanding is selectively rejecting the permissibility of any cost whatsoever—e.g., opposing nuclear power because it’s “unacceptable if it harms even one person,” while conveniently ignoring that no alternative guarantees zero harm
- People frequently overlook how often the state *worsens* climate change—for instance, policies discouraging density, overbuilding roads, solar and EV tariffs, a dysfunctional permitting system, farm subsidies, nuclear overregulation, and massive pollution by the state itself
- France is an outstanding example of the good that nuclear power can do
- There’s a fascinating parallel between the far left’s suspicion that economic experts are untrustworthy shills and the far right’s suspicion that climate experts are untrustworthy shills
- Allowing employers in the US to hire workers from other countries is no more “charity” for those workers than allowing employers in Pennsylvania to hire workers from Ohio is charity for workers from Ohio
- Conservative anti-immigration arguments about protecting the jobs of American workers are at odds with their defenses of school choice that reject the idea that public school teachers should be shielded from competition
- “Citizens should collectively dictate what hiring decisions employers are permitted to make” is a socialist principle, not a libertarian one
- One of the stranger positions of (ostensibly) progressive anti-nationalists is objecting to hiring “cheap foreign labor” given that the foreign workers will typically benefit more from those jobs than richer domestic workers (and this is setting aside the lump of labor fallacy)
- Milei update
- “If you support freedom of movement, why don’t you leave the front door of your house open?” “If you support freedom of expression, why don’t you let me put a bumper sticker on your car?”
- In honor of Jimmy Carter, here’s a reminder that airline deregulation is good
- From Schumpeter’s *Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy*
- Conservatives who are opposed to admitting more immigrant workers and progressives who are opposed to the rich getting richer are both guilty of zero sum thinking
- My New Year’s resolution is to post this more often:
- “Anne shouldn’t make 10x more than Bill unless she works 10x harder than Bill” is not a principle we should use to determine how to allocate income. We should incentivize people to do what others value not what happens to take a lot of work
- The claim that police departments aren’t actually democratic socialist institutions because police unions have shielded them from democratic accountability is unpersuasive because this is in fact precisely how democracy functions in the real world of interest groups
- Milei update:
- If unions aren’t raising productivity, they’re unable to significantly boost wages without resorting to tactics that shield their members from competition (from, for instance, foreign workers or automation) but impose costs on everyone else
